I agree with much of your post, but I disagree when it comes to the zombie. The sisters were my first, and are still my arena team. That means they were my first gear 12 team and have served me well all this time (I started last Oct.), I have been in the top 50 since they became my main team and I still usually finish top 50.

The fact that I was doing what the game says you're supposed to do, progress your team, should not put me at a disadvantage to other people using the same team.

You say " It took about 30 seconds to read the kit and see the synergies were better for weak zombie." That is simply not true for the arena. Yes, people were using that strategy in the beginning, but it soon became clear that if you want to rank really high you needed a strong zombie. It wasn't until the Sith raid when the paper zombie became the team you really wanted.

Like I said, I do agree with most of your other points though.

I also whaled out on NS (one of my favorite parts of Star Wars canon - seriously would have bought and geared Talzin even if she was a mediocre toon) and in my developed shard they were functional until recently. They had a pretty great run in my shard and it's cool to know they're still functioning in other shards (virtual fist bump to you, my friend). I kept my zombie weak to feed Asajj right away, though I wasn't as conscious of the other synergies (with Talzin and Daka) until a little later. And in the intervening months other players have spent and planned and built around what they want to get out of an NS team with a paper zombie. I had no problem getting #1 in arena with weak zombie from the start and for months - though it did have a disadvantage against other NS teams with strong zombie. Strong zombies are more viable against the current meta, and have always been more viable against some teams (like troopers - though the double tank build with GK and weak zombie can also take down troopers).

And it's clear paper zombie was a developer mistake - they have pretty much admitted it. And I do think, for sure, players who leveled zombie should be compensated in some way. But at this point, justifying the nerf based on the idea of game integrity doesn't hold up.

And that is the bigger issue here. If we don't look at the specifics of a given toon and how that toons fits into our individual choices and think of the competitive principles at stake, we all stand to lose from the type of nerf this is. At a certain point in time, and that does have to be a more relative and subjective assessment, dev mistakes become fully integrated into the game and the devs should just have to basically eat their mistakes as the game has "progressed" (their term) based on their decisions.

Gamers should be opposed to these kind of nerfs on principle and we need to stick together and make clear that this type of a nerf, in this context, is not cool. I haven't invested in Shan or Nest, it's clearly a problem that they operate so well at low stars, but as I see most people I know throwing on gear and making other choices related to building squads around the reality of what the devs have done there will reach a point (soon) where nerfing them will be a clear negation of the game itself.

And we definitely shouldn't passively accept these rationales that what is happening to the game right now is about protecting competition and progression when what is happening actually undermines those ideas and seems more a response to deeper mistakes they've made related to their rate of profit.

Are you going do just disrupt all the time and effort people put in nightsisters and other teams just bc you devs DON'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU'RE DOING? the nightsisters squad isn't a auto team it takes careful planning to know what your doing and when to do! An 3asy fix is to change how isolate works against raid bosses this is total [email protected]#$% ban my post take it off you all suck and have no clue on how to fix a game that you broke in the first place! Maybe we will get 5 traya shards guess what noone wants them. Next time you make a raid how bout you look over everyone's kit b4 you launch it!

No, it's not my final answer. It's my answer for now as we monitor how the change impacts the player base. We recognize it's a pretty big change and want to see how it performs over time.

Don't make the change until you understand the impact is another logical way of resolving the issue. Or just fix isolate in raids..... Do you guys always act so impulsively?

The reason we responded so quickly on this issue is because we didn't want players to begin to make long term investment decisions around (player ownable) Darth Traya and the raid and have us take it away one months from now. In general, we try to catch these sorts of infinite loops and other overly performant teams early, but we evaluate on a case by case basis. In the past, the Nightsisters didn't cross the threshold. With the introduction of the Critolyte team, we opted to make some changes to Bonds of Weakness that has some impact on Nightsisters.

Our testing in house shows that they are still very good in Phase 4 and still outperform most teams in that Phase. In the balance of things, undercutting Critolyte and leaving the Nightsisters in a very good place made sense to us at the time.

our issue is we DID make a long term investment and you decided to screw us over ...again! and we are tired of hearing that excuse that you are doing this to protect us. There are so many ways you could have fixed this problem without affecting our long term investments.

Really cannot believe what you are doing. There is one Team, that creates that loop, i do understand you have to do something against it, and doing it quick might be a good idea. But there it ends. Instead of changing one special of one Char - you are nerfing not only the whole NS-Team (destroying is the better word), lots of your customers have been working hard on, no, you are really nerfing two Phases of the Raid for what ,excuse me lately i can't follow, 140 chars? Nobody can be healed up to 100 %, Specials of a lot of chars are nearly useless. All, because you are afraid of Traya? Really don't get it."Why not just change how isolate works **** raid bosses? Namely the health steal. That will stop the infinite loop and keep the NS at their status quo."
Just do it, and than think about your Acolyte-Problem. This will fix the Problem and leave other chars unharmed.
It really is that easy.
My guild just went heroic, we have been buildung up (i know slowly) and now, after we finally manage to do heroic - you change the rules.
Thanks for that, enjoy monitoring and congrats to all Traya-Owners, CG just made it a lot harder to follow up.

LOL "As we monitor how the change impacts the player base." That trick won't fool us again. Normally I try to stay on your side, CG, but this is dumb. Since when have you actually done something good as a result of "monitoring the player base". You have an open forum for STR feedback yet you ignore it continue to divide the player base. So now that some people have their nice new Traya, and MANY others are in guilds trying to grind out the raid, you make it way harder for the guilds really trying, yet approve of now anyone who has used the NS teams previously. How about you take away Traya from anyone who has used NS teams in the past and monitor how that change impacts the player base?

I get fixing the issue so that people who are able to use traya don't get an even larger advantage in the raid, but why in the hell would you mess with the base NS team after players have spent MONTHS farming character shards and gear to use them. This not only hurts people who have now wasted money but hurts guilds trying to get to hSTR because one of the required teams no puts out less damage. On top of it all you guys SPRINTED towards a fix once this came to light, yet we are 3 months into a STR feedback thread with not a word from anyone at your company about how you are going to impliment the feedback you asked for.

I think if the response was - we have this cheesy loop- we have decided to get rid of acolyte from the game, instead of this other madness we had planned. The compensation will be 25 mk 4 carbs.
We would say - well thank you and have a fantastic weekend.

Wow. I'm almost at a loss to express how appalled I am at the solution to this "situation". The speed at which this loophole was fixed compared to lingering issues which hordes of players complain about, the fact that the loophole was exploitable by a small few, the fact the the fix adversely affects far more teams than the target loophole, the fact that this was hastily fixed at the end of a Friday before a weekend, the fact that there are not many teams that are good in STR and this nerfs one of them, the fact that the teams affected require significant investment in terms of time or money. What are you thinking?!
I'm putting down the game for the weekend and enjoying some camping. Absolute perfect timing.

I'm still baffled by this decision. Is this team too powerful? Probably.
However, why not change the raid, instead of the team?
Also, why are we focusing so much time and energy on nerfing a team that requires a 7* Traya. If you own a 7* Traya, you already have the ability to get super high scores! What difference is 5,000,000 damage? There are approximately 2 billion QoL updates that players would love to see implemented instead of taking a problem that affects >1% of the playersbase and imposing a "solution" that hurts 99% of the playerbase.

#CloneHelmets4Life...VICTORY!!!! "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere."

Wow. I'm almost at a loss to express how appalled I am at the solution to this "situation". The speed at which this loophole was fixed compared to lingering issues which hordes of players complain about, the fact that the loophole was exploitable by a small few, the fact the the fix adversely affects far more teams than the target loophole, the fact that this was hastily fixed at the end of a Friday before a weekend, the fact that there are not many teams that are good in STR and this nerfs one of them, the fact that the teams affected require significant investment in terms of time or money. What are you thinking?!
I'm putting down the game for the weekend and enjoying some camping. Absolute perfect timing.

No, it's not my final answer. It's my answer for now as we monitor how the change impacts the player base. We recognize it's a pretty big change and want to see how it performs over time.

Don't make the change until you understand the impact is another logical way of resolving the issue. Or just fix isolate in raids..... Do you guys always act so impulsively?!

The reason we responded so quickly on this issue is because we didn't want players to begin to make long term investment decisions around (player ownable) Darth Traya and the raid and have us take it away one months from now. In general, we try to catch these sorts of infinite loops and other overly performant teams early, but we evaluate on a case by case basis. In the past, the Nightsisters didn't cross the threshold. With the introduction of the Critolyte team, we opted to make some changes to Bonds of Weakness that has some impact on Nightsisters.

Our testing in house shows that they are still very good in Phase 4 and still outperform most teams in that Phase. In the balance of things, undercutting Critolyte and leaving the Nightsisters in a very good place made sense to us at the time.

I didnt put four zetas on a team specifically for this raid to do better than most. Because of characters I'm not even using, my best team now does better than "most".

You reacted quickly on this, but let sisters go for months without mentioning there was a problem, and then theres the implication that we're also going to have to gear another toom on top of it.

You can call this whatever you want, but its not okay. There were other ways to fix this.

And this, specifically, is what is going to discourage me from powering up teams in the future. One day is too long, but man you better think twice about teams that have been viable for months. What's next, Thrawn? Troopers? Jtr? Greedo's version of chex?

@CG_TopHat you do realize you just did something twofold right?
First you missed the mark with this whole issue. Rather than cut the strategy that very few elite players have, you decide to broaden the fix and go after an entire factions viability in the raid and soon arena with the zombie fix. Don’t be surprised when the threads demanding zeta refunds start popping up en masse.
Secondly? In your post you said that you and the team have been watching the thread about this intently and quoted some players and ideas. If you can pay attention to this, why can’t you guys pay attention to the megathread that one of your own created that has 1400+ posts begging for a fix to rewards and lower tier health pools. Thanks for admitting that you guys simply just don’t care and lied about all the promises you made back in April. Can’t say I’m surprised but given how this will negatively impact the game I’d have thought you guys wouldn’t make such a knee **** reaction.

First I absolutely agree that there is no reason why they can't fix rewards of the lower tier. I have been there and it was horrible.

Second, the change doesn't eliminate NS viability. It just makes it impossible to solo DN in phase 4. But the raid is supposed to be a collective effort, so I am not gonna complain too much about it.

I keep thinking it over in my head, and I just cannot for my life understand why a 4 zeta team high skill team that requires good thinking and maneuverbility in strategy is getting hit hard like that. So instead, I'll turn my head and point the blame at Trayacolyte. Yeah that one team that you press basic auto and it deals 10 million to DN with no effort. My guess is that the bonds update was meant more so for that team than the sisters. My only question is, why not just slap some tweaks to Traya's isolate on raid bosses to not give health steal and instead something lesser like Defense penetration? A super simple fix and it doesn't mess with a huge crowd of people that INVESTED 4 Zetas and many many G12 pieces.

Not to be out done by FoxNext, CG has a day where we see them Nerf another raid team, effectively devalueing a team people have spends hundred to thousands of dollars to aquire, while also screwing up the speed stats on the mods of about 1% of the playing population.